The air around Poco Leok carries an unsettling silence. The kind that echoes between the slopes of hills where ancestral spirits are said to roam, where rituals of planting and harvest are not just seasonal but cosmological cycles anchoring life to the land.
This silence now stretches not from tranquillity but from tension — an anticipation sharpened by betrayal. At the western side of Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara, the Pocoleok Indigenous Community faces an unfolding trauma inflicted in the name of progress. One draped in the language of renewable energy, financed by the promise of global sustainability, and enforced through the apparatus of the Indonesian state.
It is the expansion of the Ulumbu Geothermal Power Plant that tears through the sacred landscapes of Pocoleok.
PT. PLN, the country’s national electricity company, with backing from the German state-owned KfW Development Bank, has mobilised machinery and state personnel into these hills under the banner of development. What remains unsaid in official reports is the bruising violence of extraction when imposed upon Indigenous territories without consent, without dialogue, without recognition.
The people of Pocoleok have rejected the expansion. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly and with clarity. Their rejection has been met not with negotiation, but with silence and the slow machinery of displacement.
When the National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia (KOMNAS HAM) launched its investigation, the evidence it uncovered was damning. Prompted by complaints lodged by AMAN (Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago) and PPMAN (Lawyers Network for Indigenous Peoples), the commission identified multiple violations of Indigenous rights. The most significant among them is the clear breach of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), a right enshrined not only in international conventions but echoed through centuries of adat law, where land is not property but relation.
PT. PLN did not seek consent. KfW, despite its public commitments to human rights and sustainable finance, has continued its financial support of the project. The German bank commissioned an independent investigation in response to community complaints, yet no outcomes have been shared with those whose lives hang in the balance.
The community waits. They wait as heavy machinery digs into earth that has for generations been held as sacred. They wait as outsiders define the fate of land that holds the bones of their ancestors. They wait with a haunting familiarity — for in the history of Indonesia’s development, the waiting of the dispossessed is a recurring wound.
Every delayed response, every unreturned letter, every closed-door meeting adds to the violence. This is not simply about a geothermal plant. It is about the persistent denial of Indigenous agency under the guise of national interest.
In Poco Leok, resistance takes on quiet forms. It is in the refusal to sign documents. It is in the walking away from staged consultations. It is in the mourning songs that rise during rituals asking the spirits for guidance.
And it is in the defiance of women who sit at the frontlines when the trucks come, standing between bulldozers and burial sites. These are not scenes easily found in corporate social responsibility reports or in the technocratic language of development agencies. But they are the raw and living expressions of a people refusing to be erased.
The land, for the Pocoleok community, is not an asset. It is inheritance and obligation.
To claim this land for energy — even renewable energy — without the will of its stewards is to strip it of meaning. The promise of clean electricity to the nation cannot justify a process that renders a people voiceless. And yet this contradiction lies at the core of the project.
In a time when Europe projects its green commitments across the globe, the financing of this project by KfW reveals the double standard of the energy transition. Clean for whom? At what cost? The Pocoleok community’s marginalisation becomes collateral in a narrative that paints geothermal as benign and green.
KOMNAS HAM’s findings are clear, but accountability has yet to follow. PT. PLN remains steadfast in its refusal to halt the expansion. Government officials at the provincial level speak of job creation and national goals. There is little appetite to confront the difficult truth: that development, even when renewable, is not neutral. It is shaped by power and carried out in spaces where some lives are rendered expendable.
In Poco Leok, the community does not ask to be saved. They ask to be heard. They ask that the dignity of their decision to say no be respected.
But dignity does not feature in the ledger books of financiers. Nor does ancestral knowledge find space in environmental impact assessments designed with technical metrics rather than cosmological maps.
The German government’s silence in the face of these violations is damning. That KfW has yet to respond substantively to the community speaks volumes about where its priorities lie. Between political risk and moral responsibility, the choice has been made to wait. To delay. To defer. It is a tactic as old as colonisation.
The expansion continues. Each day, a little more forest is cut. Each day, the perimeter grows. And each day, the Pocoleok people wake up with the awareness that their future is being decided elsewhere.
It is not only about territory. It is about erasure. The slow, bureaucratised, technocratic process of erasure masked as policy and investment. It is this quiet violence — not dramatic arrests or televised conflict — that poses the greatest threat. It operates in boardrooms, in funding agreements, in government decrees.
There is a brutal irony in the fact that a community so deeply aligned with ecological balance is now being displaced in the name of ecological transition. The energy produced from their land will not power their homes. The profits extracted from their soil will not fund their schools.
This is not just a story of displacement. It is a story of dispossession layered with hypocrisy. To speak of sustainability while violating Indigenous rights is not only disingenuous, it is dangerous. It normalises a development model that treats Indigenous peoples as obstacles rather than as custodians.
The people of Pocoleok have done what few others have had the strength to do. They have said no. Unequivocally. In a world where consent is often manufactured through coercion or ignorance, such clarity is rare: and it is costly.
Community leaders have faced intimidation. Local organisers have been threatened. Journalists covering the story have been met with assaults or spin from state officials. The architecture of impunity remains intact.
And yet, they persist. In ceremonies that reaffirm their link to the land. In community meetings that map out strategies of resistance. In letters sent again and again to authorities who pretend not to see. This is not merely a campaign. It is a struggle for existence.
The Pocoleok resistance invites a reckoning. Not only for Indonesia, but for the global institutions that claim to uphold human rights while enabling violations. It forces a question that development banks like KfW must confront: can there be green energy without justice? Can there be transition without consent? Can finance ever be neutral in a world structured by inequality?
As long as these questions remain unanswered, the silence around Poco Leok will grow heavier. Not with fear, but with the weight of unfinished resistance. The hills will remember. The spirits will know. And the world, if it chooses to listen, will have to reckon with what it means to build a sustainable future on the bones of Indigenous lands.
This is not just an Indonesian story. It is a global one.
The Pocoleok community stands not alone but among countless others facing the same erasure. Their resistance speaks across oceans and borders, a reminder that progress without justice is simply another form of violence. And until justice is done, their silence will speak louder than any machine ever could.
Share this content: